Effects of support stiffnesses on optimal damper placement for a planar building frame

Abstract

An efficient and systematic procedure is proposed for finding the optimal damper positioning to minimize the dynamic compliance of a planar building frame. The dynamic compliance is expressed in terms of the transfer function amplitudes of the interstory drifts evaluated at the undamped fundamental natural frequency. The dynamic compliance is minimized subject to a constraint on the sum of the damping coefficients of added dampers. Optimality criteria are derived and the optimal damper positioning is determined via an original steepest direction search algorithm. This algorithm enables one to find an optimal damper positioning sequentially for gradually increasing damper levels. The influences of support-member stiffnesses on the response suppression level and on the optimal damper positioning are also disclosed numerically. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.